What pleases me to know is that even Rush Limbaugh came out to admonish Lott. Maybe there’s some hope for him in the afterlife.
So, where is the taking Clinton to task for calling another racist a man whom everyone in the Arkansas Ozarks a special debt of gratitude, and called him one of the great leaders of our times.
Namely, Fulbright, who was elected several times in Arkansas primarily on his pro-segregation stance.
Not much different from Strom, save of course, Fulbright was a dem.
Well, I’m not familiar with what Clinton said about Fulbright, but from the sense I get from your post there is a very big difference.
Clinton isn’t saying Fulbright is a great man, and would have been even better if his pro-segregration stance had won out.
Lott, apparently, is.
See, one is praising in general the activities of a noted man, without mentioning either way that man’s stance on race/segregation. The other is praising the same thing, but also then bringing up a very specific point about race/segregation.
So there is far less reason to take Clinton to task. Lott deserves all the shit that’s coming down on him.
Asked and answered in the same post. Very neatly done, but then it should be after nearly a decade of practice. Maybe with a little more effort you could make it go elsewhere too. Sort of cover up this whole sorry mess with revisionist memories of the horrors visited upon us by the demons of the past ? Damn, that’d make us all feel so friggin noble and righteous wouldn’t it ?
You were watching Fox, you devil you!
It’s a completely different situation. Lott is not being criticized or taken to task just for saying nice things about Strom Thurmond. Lott is being taken to task (justifiably) for stating that the country would have been a better place (i.e. wouldn’t have all “these problems”) if Strom Thurmond had been elected President in 1948. The reason Lott is being taken to task is not simply because Strom Thurmond was a bigot when he ran in 1948. It’s because Strom Thurmond’s whole candidacy was based on defending the racial status quo in the South, a status quo which included segregation, inequality, disenfranchisement, and lynchings. Lott went a lot further than simply calling Thurmond a good or great man. Lott basically said that the country made a mistake by rejecting the things Strom Thurmond stood for in 1948.
But hey, thanks for playing and we have some lovely parting gifts for you . . .
I should also add to my post above yet another difference: namely, you’d be hard-pressed to find many people who think Clinton is in any way, shape, or form a racist. Not the same for Lott. And the internal motivations of someone when they speak cannot be separated from their words.
I’m afraid I disagree. First of all, Fulbright was a much better Senator than Thurmond – who accomplished nothing during his many years in the Senate. More importantly, I assume Clinton didn’t specifically praise Fulbright’s pro-segregation activities. For whatever reason, Lott did praise Thurmond’s efforts to maintain Jim Crow.
>>I at least would of thought Trent Lott spoke English.
>>GAH!!!
You at least would have thought!
Personally I think the fault is in the spelling. You really would’ve thought.
http://apnews.excite.com/article/20021210/D7NQLPJO2.html
OK, so what the hell did the statement mean then, Trent? Wouldn’t this “apology” be just a wee bit more believable if he actually offered up a plausible non-racist explanation of what the comment meant?
The Family Research Council (a “religious right” organization not noted for its bleeding-heart liberalism) has also been raking Lott over the coals for his remarks:
There seems to be a lot of :smack:'ing going on in the rightward regions of the American political spectrum. It will be interesting to see if anything substantive comes of it, though. (I.e., if the distinguished Senator’s political career actually suffers any.)
—Read your history, Apos.—
I’ve read it. Unfortunately, that forces me to look at it in a way that goes beyond a few sentances. What’s obvious to you is not what’s obvious in general, and certainly is not what’s obvious to someone like Lott.
—Now, what could all “these problems” be? Well, he doesn’t say. That’s true. But Lott expressed a belief that there are problems in society that would not exist had followed the pro-segregation creed that Thurmond was espousing in 1948, and that society would be a better place for it.—
You’re making those connections, in the abscence of knowing what Lott meant. To you, all that matters is segregation. To Lott, I’m not so sure that’s true. I’m certainly not trying to suggest that Lott’s comments DIDN’T mean what you say, but I guess I’m not as eager a fan of the “Gotcha!” game.
No, I think he thought it would make an old man feel good and I’m not against that kind of sentiment. However, I don’t mean to sound like I am blindly supporting my senator. I think the fact that Lott ran for senate leader over our senior senator Thad Cochran tells you that he is out for #1. Also that perpetual motion machine was invented by someone from Mississippi, so it was pure pork belly politics.
Concerning zigaretten’s list of strange things politicans have done, I wish to add Carter claiming that a swimming rabbit attacked him. He also claimed to have seen a UFO and promised during the election to release all information the government had after he got into office. That was the last time he mentioned it.
You and the point seem to be complete strangers. I’m am not trying to read Lott’s mind, nor do I have to. It’s enough to look at the words that actually came out of his mouth and the historical context of those remarks.
Thurmond’s candidacy arose specifically out of his opposition to the civil rights plank in the Democrats’ 1948 platform. Thurmond sought the presidency in 1948 on a platform advocating maintaining the racial status quo in the South and fighting civil rights legislation. His candidacy had no other purpose. It’s raison d’etre was preservation of segregation and racial inequality.
I’m making the connections between Lott’s statement and segregation because the connections are there to be made, and made quite readily. It’s not that “all that matters to me is segregation.” It’s that all that mattered to Thurmond in 1948 was segregation, and Lott said that we would be better off now if Thurmond had won the Presidency in 1948 and enacted the platform on which he ran. The platform on which Thurmond ran was explicitly pro-segregation and it was the support of segregation that contrasted it from the Democratic party that he deserted that year. And that’s why Lott’s comments have generated the reaction they did.
Lott had the perfect opportunity to explain what he really meant in his apology, yet did not do so. I thought maybe that the apology was longer, and the AP wire only printed part of it, but Lott’s page at http://lott.senate.gov/ has the same short apology.
In the absence of any counter-explanation, his apology is very unconvincing IMHO.
The “discarded” policies of the past, he called them in his “apology”. Not discredited, contemptible, hateful, or any other adjective that would show any understanding of why they were discarded.
This story’s legs are just beginning to grow, and it will come to a head right about the time to formalize the election of the majority leaders for the next term, just a few weeks away.
I open up today’s Chicago Tribune and what do I see? Apparently the “Dump Lott” movement has begun.
The NAACP wants him out, and the Congressional Black Caucus doesn’t think the apology went far enough.
http://www.cnn.com/2002/ALLPOLITICS/12/10/lott.comment/index.html
Here ya go, Stofsky. Took one Google click–Strom’s got the mounted trophies nailed to the virtual wall of his Senate web page. 
Mighty hunter of pork…
http://thurmond.senate.gov/pages/bio.htm
And that’s not to mention the Strom Thurmond Lake, Dam and Highway, Clarks Hills, SC, 1987, or the Strom Thurmond Highway, I-20 from the Georgia Border to Florence, SC, 1992, or streets in several South Carolina towns and cities, or the Strom Thurmond life-sized statue on the Town Square, Edgefield, SC, erected by people of Edgefield County, 1984, or the Strom Thurmond Bust by Rick Hart, presented June 5, 1997, or the Strom Thurmond Monument, Columbia, SC, December 4, 1999.
Picture of the Strom Thurmond monument.
http://carolinareporter.sc.edu/archive%209-9-99/stories/strom.htm
$850,000, paid for by private donations. Big donors got their names on the base.
Is it me or does it look like a Plastic Army Man?
The Bush administration brooks no political liabilities. My suspicion is that, having shown party solidarity and pledged his support for Lott as majority leader, Bush will send Karl Rove and/or Dick Cheney behind the scenes to “persuade” Lott to step down as majority leader. And then he would join a growing pile of prominent Republicans who were nudged out of their positions because they had become a liability to the administration.